Computer Program That Analyzed Shuttle Was Misused, Engineer Says

Published: August 25, 2003

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Mr. Richardson, who at 74 still runs marathons, said that if the Boeing engineers had been sufficiently knowledgeable, they could have performed calculations similar to the ones that he came up with after the accident. Instead, he said, they relied on superficial training to set in motion "one of the worst engineering calls of all time."

The problem, Mr. Richardson said, was that Boeing lost a great deal of expertise when it moved many shuttle functions from its California facilities to Houston and Florida.

The move from Huntington Beach and the loss of technological expertise are among the broader contextual issues that the Gehman board is addressing in its report.

Ed Memi, a Boeing spokesman, acknowledged that "there was some loss of expertise in the move — we're not denying that." But he said the company tried to minimize it by having the old workers train the replacements in what they called a "knowledge capture program." He said the personnel moves were not related to the analysis problems.

Mr. Memi also said that Mr. Richardson's concerns about the level of training of the people who used Crater during the mission were not well founded because "it's not that difficult to use." And, he said, the Crater analysis was borne out in tests at the Southwest Research Institute in which foam was shot at high speed at the tile portion of a mocked-up wing. In those tests, which preceded the tests in which foam was shot at the leading-edge panels, the foam did not gouge out the full depth of the tile. "Crater was conservative," he said. "It over-predicted."

But Mr. Richardson said there was an underlying message: it seemed to him that Boeing was desperate to tell its big client what it wanted to hear. As he began to examine the analysis from the mission, he looked at a second piece of research that engineers did during the mission to determine the potential for the heat of reentry to harm the shuttle. Again, he said, he found numerous errors. "And like the Crater analysis, the nature of the errors in each case was to reduce the predicted damage to the vehicle, indicating that this was the goal of the analysis."

Crater "was supposed to be conservative — it was supposed to be the worst case," he said. "But on orbit, you can't dismiss it. You have to be conservative."

Mr. Memi said: "These guys had a fixed amount of time to come to a decision. They did the best they could with the tools that they had."

After-the-fact testing, Mr. Richardson said, does not change what Boeing and NASA should have done with the Crater warning. "What they should have said was, `Maybe we don't really know — so you have to take the picture to find out.' "

The Gehman board has examined the use of Crater closely.

An investigator for the board said that Mr. Richardson's testimony fits into an overall pattern of problems that the board has uncovered. Crater, the investigator said, "was used, but not by experts," and a new model for evaluating damage is needed. But ultimately, "the problem didn't lie in Crater," the investigator said, "but in the decision process that unquestioningly accepted the assessment."

Mr. Richardson said Crater opens the door to issues of expertise, safety, risk, life and death. Near the end of his interview with the investigators, he said that detractors of Crater told him "we need a better methodology." He had a ready reply, he said: "No, you need smaller debris."